Tuesday, September 5, 2017

response to brunem


i love witnessing your process after long-short years
of knowing you closer, then farther, then closer
a catch in my heart as i think about us both writing
from new email addresses, new names
propping up hearts that are impossibly old.

what is old before our time? if we are connected
to the endlessness of weaving you describe
as underpinning the legacy of femme.

walking through the park yesterday, i thought
of fem as an adjective, 
femme as an impossibly brilliant verb, the difference
between a life seen and a life lived.
the difference between not looking sick
and living on the edge of death
and planting flowers around it.

i hear the deep pain in your experience.
i want to hold it, carry it
i want both of us to know that even when we can't tend
to our external beauty anymore
this role, femme, will still be here to carry us -
to make our bodies home.

the relationship webs we weave tighter than fishnet, 
our names, our gardens, our loves:

we are the material community 
manifested from the memory of all the witnessers 
who have come before us.

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